David Filner assumed the administrative leadership of the San Antonio Symphony in November, 2012. Led by Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing, the San Antonio Symphony is celebrating its 73rd year this season.

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Making mistakes is okay

One of my favorite “Peanut” comic strips had Charlie Brown at Lucy’s psychiatric booth spilling his heart out about how he felt like a complete failure. Lucy said to him that he should not worry because “we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.” Charlie Brown yelled back, “That makes me the smartest person in the world!”

Physicist Niels Bohr had an elegant way of talking about mistakes. He defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Thomas Edison tried 10,000 different experiments to create the light blub. When asked how it felt to fail so many times he replied, “I have not failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways NOT to make a light blub.”

Recently the League of American Orchestras held its annual conference and ideas about innovation and experimentation where the talk of the meetings. One speaker said that 85% of business experiments fail. But you need to have all these failures to find the 15% of new ideas that are transformative.

Musicians understand this completely. This is what practicing an instrument is all about–making thousands of small mistakes (or experiments in a way of playing) over and over again until you can play the passage correctly. Careful listening and analysis of mistakes is what leads to progress.

But what about arts organizations? Do we know how to make mistakes creatively? I think it is a huge problem. We have created this myth about the concert experience–it has to be perfect every time. This almost guarantees that we can’t innovate. Recently, the LA Opera presented Wagner’s Ring Cycle with an experimental staging. It got horrible reviews and the company posted a $6 million loss on the project. Can they ever try another experiment? The stakes are so high. The margins in the arts are so tight. How can we find room for positive experimentation?

I remember an expensive restaurant in Orlando, Florida I enjoyed in the 1980s. It offered only one five-course menu every night. Each night this menu changed completely. Every time I went I had a similar experience. Two or three of the courses were very good. One was terrible. And one was SPECTACULAR! The chefs were forced to constantly innovate every night. I always thought that the terrible course was the price I paid for the spectacular one. It was my favorite restaurant.

Yet, this is exactly opposite the dining experience in almost every restaurant in America. The menu must never change. We demand the same food, prepared exactly the same every night. When we travel, the food in California must taste exactly like the food in NYC. I hate this! But, recently the slow food movement is beginning to change a few minds about dining using local and seasonal produce. I see a direct correlation with music.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a concert where three pieces were presented and the audience was not sure it enjoyed all three, but preferred it that way? Maybe one-third of the audience might dislike the first selection, but another third thought this was the highlight of the evening. Imagine if we could gather the entire audience together (perhaps through Facebook?) for a passionate discussion after the performance. Imagine if nobody was intimidated by the complex technical language of music, and we all enjoyed the lively post-concert discussions almost as much as the concert itself.

It takes a huge leap of imagination to picture this scenario. And yet, I think that is what it must have been like to be a music patron in the time of Mozart. Audiences demanded new works every performance. They had no interest in hearing just greatest hits from the past. When you read the letters from artists from that time, you can almost imagine yourself in Demel’s coffee shop (a legendary Viennese coffee and pastry shop that dates from Mozart’s time and is still in business) after the concert loudly debating the value of Mozart’s latest masterpiece.

Sebastian Lang-Lessing told me a fabulous story about an experience he had while conducting an opera in Paris. Every day before rehearsal, he had coffee across the street from the opera house. Every day he had the same waiter. After several weeks, he asked the waiter if he enjoyed going to the opera. The waiter responded that he didn’t even know there was opera in the neighborhood! Sebastian invited the waiter and nine of his friends to be his guest at the next performance. The only thing he asked of them was to join him for wine and conversation after the performance. All 10 friends had never been to the opera before and Sebastian said the post-concert conversation was one of the most lively and valuable conversations about music he ever had. Sebastian didn’t try to teach them the “correct” response to the opera. He just listened and learned.

We are going to try to re-create that experience here. Sebastian’s debut concert as Music Director is on October 2, but he isn’t here on a regular basis until January. (In October and November, he has a previously booked engagement conducting opera in Denver.) Starting in January, we are going to invite a handful of first-time audience members to join him for a casual post-conversation after many of our concerts. I can’t wait to find out what we learn, and I hope we have the courage to try some experiments based on the reactions of these first-time concert-goers. And, if we do experiment, I hope our long-time loyal audiences don’t mind when some of these attempts fail.